This Side of You
by BarbedWire
Summary: A scene of total pillowy softness, or fluff between Noble Six and Tobry. Written for TheHaloFreak. Oneshot.


**Author's Note: Crossover, whoo! I got a little bit of explaining to do. First of all, I don't own Halo Reach or The Tainted Realm Series by Ian Irvine. Second of all, I haven't actually read The Tainted Realm. I've just heard about it, and read a bunch of selected Tobry quotes. The inspiration for this is a really long story, but the short version is that my sister, TheHaloFreak, challenged me to write about her Halo Reach character and Tobry. So I wrote this, which makes the most sense if you assume that Tobry and Six have spent a bit of time together as friends who pull pranks and get drunk. That's how it makes sense. For those of you who know any of my other stories, you know that I said I was technically done with Fanfiction, but I just couldn't refuse this challenge from my sister:)  
I apologize for the grammar, I fixed some of the obvious issues, but I'm sure I missed some. If you'd like to read about Six in an unadulterated version, SPARTAN B312: The Fall of Reach by TheHaloFreak is her real story.  
I apologize for anything I may have gotten wrong about SPARTAN armor or Tobry's character.  
Reviews would be totally awesome;) I think thats all I have to say.  
Enjoy!  
-BarbedWire**

"I never knew there was this side to you." He grinned at her, cocking his slightly furry head to the side to accentuate the action.

"There isn't." she said brusquely, turning away from his gold tinted eyes and striding several paces away. "I'm not some mushy, goopy girl. I'm a SPARTAN, a highly trained super soldier who went into a lot of no win situations that were meant to be suicidal and still came out alive." To her intense irritation, Tobry laughed, and if she had been somebody else she might have said that the sound was something like unicorns and heaven and rainbows. But she wasn't somebody else, she was SPARTAN B312 and so all she would say was that it was like the trigger of her DMR or her fist colliding with an Elite's mouth. That was a much better image really.

"That's what you do," Tobry corrected. "It's not what you are. Or at least not all you are."

"How do you know?" she snapped. She did not appreciate the way he was making her think, or act, or feel. His entire existence was somehow cumbersome to her own- and she loved it. She had no idea what might happen with her life now that she knew Tobry Lagger, but she didn't care. "How do you know that this armor and fighting aren't all I know?"

"It probably is all you know. I don't think you've spent a great deal of time thinking about anything else, but that doesn't mean it's not there."

"I liked you better drunk." He laughed again, this time it reminded her of grenades and turrets.

"And _I_ liked _you_ better drunk," he agreed. "Which can be arranged, in fact it would probably make this a lot easier."

"Make what a lot easier kilt-boy?"

While they had been talking, Tobry had taken the extra few steps necessary to close the gap between them. He now stood mere inches from Six, a mischievous grin stretched across his furred face.

"Us. It would make it much easier and less exhausting to do this if you weren't thinking quite so much."

"So you want me to get stupid and drunk so I'll sleep with you? I don't think you're supposed to tell me that part."

"Well whether or not you get drunk is your decision. But you can't argue that all that thinking is getting pretty annoying," Six considered this statement for a minute. It was true that the way that Tobry made her think was frustrating. Or perhaps it was Tobry himself, she hadn't quite figured out yet which one of them made everything so difficult. Was it him, and the way he joked and laughed and winked and made lewd propositions all the time? Or was it her, and the way she smiled into her helmet at him and pretended to be more drunk than she was and filled her stomach with butterflies and her mind with conflicting cries of 'he's an asshole!' and 'I wanna pull pranks with him for the rest of forever!' whenever they were together.

"I'll think whenever the Hell I want to. About whatever the Hell I want to."

"I know. And I wouldn't presume to try and stop you. Personally, I don't have a lot of patience for girls that can be bossed around so easily. They have their uses, obviously. But only for a night or so."

"You are a complete pig."

"And you're a cold-hearted, semi-robotic, gun nut." If anyone else that she knew had said that, she would have picked them up by the throat and thrown them into the wall, or onto a table covered with drinks, or all the way down the shooting range. But when the words fell from Tobry's smiling lips, her only reaction was to smile like some dim-witted schoolgirl, which would have been absolutely mortifying had her helmet not been on.

As if her state of gooey nonsense wasn't bad enough, to her horror, Six found herself speaking.

"Well then we're the perfect pair aren't we?"

"That's the conclusion I was just coming to." That was it. There was absolutely nothing redeemable in this entire person, except his ability to hold his liquor and his sense of humor and his love of pranks. Other than that, Six had no use for him. None at all. Expect that he was the first person that had shown any interest in being her friend in longer than she could remember. And he made her laugh, and she had more fun with him than she'd ever had in her life. But he also made her feel a lot of strange things she had never imagined feeling. Like right now. It was as if everything solid inside her, all the reinforced bones and well used muscles, had melted. Like all that was left of her was a puddle of thoughts and feelings inside her armor. And part of her hated him for it, but part of her was experiencing the same rush that she felt during a transport before battle. It was exhilarating, in a way, and part of her never, ever wanted to live without Tobry's infuriating presence.

"So," she said, her tone clearly offering a challenge. "What is a disgraced and condemned creature like yourself going to do about it?"

"Well," began Tobry in a casual, business like voice. As he spoke he somehow managed to stand even closer to her. "I was planning on getting that helmet off for starters."

"What is it you have against the helmet?"

"Nothing. It becomes your rugged toughness well. But there's a little more to you than that, and I just find that it's a whole lot easier to get to the real you when you can't hide behind all that armor."

"Who said I was hiding?"

"I did, just now." if it wasn't for the fact that he really was the most fun person she knew, Six would have shoved her knife into Tobry's neck. But he was the most fun person she knew, and besides he quickly moved so close to her, closer than she would have thought possible, so that literally the only thing between them was her purple armor.

"And I think now that you agree with me it's a little in the way," his hands moved to the sides of her helmet, and to her own surprise she did not protest as began to pull it off. The only thing which gave her any indication of where she was, or what she was doing, or who she was, was the beep of her HUD shutting down as the helmet left her face.

She looked at Tobry, so close she could actually feel the warmth of his breath. He smiled at her as she took in every inch of him with her eyes unaided and un-obscured by the devices and gadgets of her helmet.

"There," he said as Six's eyes were busy committing every detail of his pointed ears to memory. "Better?" Six scowled, the action even more satisfying when he could actually see it.

"Your breath smells." It was the only safe thing she could think of to say. She had to be herself, or risk losing her entire reputation. So naturally she couldn't open her mouth and say 'you're beautiful' or 'I can feel you breathing' or 'I think that maybe you were right about that other side of me'. No she couldn't' say any of those things, so the only option was to be rough, to insult him in some way.

Without missing a beat, Tobry grinned. "And you have helmet hair."

Partially because she was so completely overwhelmed with every strange thought and feeling that Tobry awakened in her, but mostly because she was tired of talking and longed for some action, she closed the miniscule distance between them and placed her naked lips to his.

The feeling was electric. Tobry's lips were warm and rough, and the brush of his furry cheek against hers sent a shiver down her spine. When she felt his tongue tracing patterns along her bottom lip, begging for entrance, it was too much. She'd died, or combusted or morphed into someone else and she was suddenly aware of nothing but the pounding of her own frantic heart and the taste of Tobry's tongue.

She needed him; needed desperately to feel him against her. The surface area of their locked lips was not nearly enough to satisfy her. She needed all of him, needed every inch of her to be in contact with him. Her armor was suddenly the most cumbersome, detestable piece of metal in existence.

Though it took a great deal more strength than it had taken to not snap Kat's neck every time she had had to see her, Six at last managed to pull her mouth away from Tobry's long enough breathe and force out a few words

"Damn armor," was all that she could get out, but she was confident that Tobry would take the hint.

He pulled his face back a little further, and raised an eyebrow at her. "Is that a suggestion?"

Six had had enough. She was tired of blushing, and melting and forgetting everything she knew about herself when Tobry looked at her a certain way. She was tired of having fun with him, and laughing with him and learning to need him a little more all the time. That was his plan, that was how Tobry wanted everything to go. Well, damn it, she wasn't going to have another minute of it. She was done with the way Tobry intended things to go down. She was SPARTAN B312, not one of Tobry's mindless, eyelash batting conquests.

She grasped her armored fingers around the front of his shirt and yanked him towards her so that he was once again as close as he had been.

"No. It was a goddamned order. You are going to get me out of this armor. And later you are going to help me put it back on."

Tobry's expression showed shock and surprise for only a moment before he composed it once more into his previous mocking look, "All of it?"

"Just help me out of this. Now."

"Your wish is my command," she was sure that Tobry wanted his words to be mocking, but for whatever reason he did not seem capable of mocking her right now. Instead his voice was filled with the unmistakable notes of passion and something uncharacteristically gentle, almost soft. If Six had been in a normal state of mind she would have teased him mercilessly for it. But in the state of mind she was currently in, all she wanted was for her armor to disappear so she could feel Tobry's breath on every inch of her skin.

Luckily for her Tobry decided to heed her orders and began at once to work on the grueling task of removing her purple armor, piece by piece. Obliging as he may have been, he wasn't courteous about it. instead of sensing the mounting need and passion inside her and getting it all off as quickly as possible, he pulled off each piece agonizingly slow, teasing her by planting dozens of tantalizing kisses soft enough to match the out of place gentleness in his voice as he went. Her skin was not used to being so exposed to the outside, and each time Tobry's chapped lips came into contact with its sensitive surface she shuddered. And each time Tobry paused, his hands lingering in place for a brief moment that she thought would kill her.

"Could you go any slower?" she sputtered as a moan escaped her lips. Tobry's hands froze on her white thigh as her knee guard clattered to the floor. As if his entire purpose in existing was to make her life harder, he put her lips to her ear, gently kissing the lobe before he whispered his response to her.

"Patience is a virtue." She had never known that such nerve endings existed in her ear as the warm air of his words hit their surface.

"I didn't think you liked virtuous girls."

He pulled his face away from her ear, and she wasn't sure if she was relieved or disappointed as her breathing resumed a slightly more normal pace.

"Not in the past. But this is all new to both of us isn't it?" In truth she had no idea what he meant by 'this' because nothing about what they were doing should be new to both of them: Tobry had had dozens of women, and Six had removed her armor dozens of times. But that side of her that liked the way Tobry laughed and smiled and tilted his head when he talked to her was fairly certain that whatever he was saying was something perfect and glorious, like the death cry of an elite, or the squeal of warthog's tires over a splattered grunt. So she met his lips with her own and kissed him. She kissed him as if it was the only option left to her in a no win scenario. As if she had already stepped past the point of no return and the only thing left to do was pull the pin on that grenade and throw it. Whatever might have happened, it was too late, and there was no point in worrying about it. So she kissed him, until she had no more breath in her and she had to pull away.

"I'll finish this armor now, shall I?" his voice was saturated with that sweetness that was so unlike the obnoxious, drunken Tobry she knew. It took her so off guard that all she could do was to nod and let him return to the removal of her armor.

At last Tobry had completed his arduous task and Six felt herself sandwiched between the oppressive coldness of the wall against her bare back and the welcoming warmth of Tobry's body before her.

She expected him to survey her, perhaps to tell her off for having lumpy ankles or something, but he didn't. As soon as the last piece of her armor left her body he fixed his eyes onto her face and kept them there, a small smile playing on his lips. It was as if they had done this a thousand times before, as if her naked body was so familiar, so comfortable to him that he did not need to further scrutinize it.

Which in actuality was probably just a testament to how many other women he had had, but his comfortableness and familiarity put Six at ease and she forgot to feel exposed. Instead she felt exhilarated, as if she was about to step into the biggest most glorious fight of her life.

Finally abandoning the last the vestiges of her self-consciousness in the face of her overwhelming longing, Six reached out her hand and placed her pale, smooth palm to Tobry's face. She smiled as she rubbed her thumb across the soft fur of his cheek. In a gesture much to cheesy for the Tobry she knew, he took hold of her other hand and gently pressed each of her fingers to his lips.

"Are you ready for this?"

Six rolled her eyes to stop herself from being too honest. Truthfully she had never felt both more and less ready for something in her life.

"I dare you to make me scream." She could feel his frame shake as he laughed, and it sounded like heaven and the trigger of her DMR and rainbows. She wrapped her arms around his neck and willed him to pull her closer, which he did.

"I'll take that challenge…"


End file.
